John Funiciello

It was not so much a contest to see how high the wages could go or how many more benefits a union could win at the bargaining table as it was an expression of the power a company has over its workers.

What China is doing with its Belt and Road Initiative is what powerful nations have done through their empires over the millennia: conquer or otherwise assume power (nowadays mostly economic) over weaker countries and extract from them what they want, whether it’s mining for minerals, forests for lumber, fish stocks, oil and gas, or the best arable land, no matter who or what lives on it today.

In short, the white local USDA committee members withheld money for seeds and fertilizer for black farmers, until late in the growing season. A black farmer might get the loan when the crops of the white farmers all around were a foot high. There were other ways of depriving farmers of color, but that’s an inkling of the problem and it persisted for generations.

The concentration of wealth and income in the U.S. has reached a crisis stage and the concentrated control of the food system is just one of the elements of the crisis, but it may be the most important of the crises.

Most of the workers in Bessemer are black and in struggling for a voice in the workplace (that’s what a union gives otherwise powerless workers) are building on a long history of black struggle in the South for dignity, equality, and justice.

The only thing that was blind in that blind trust were the people who believed that he was not planning to rake in money by the ton.

For the former president, nothing is sacred, if it doesn’t have the possibility of making money for him and his grifting family. He taught them well and they all will go on grifting after the dust-up of his taking over the Republican Party and changing it into a version of one of his properties.

The possibilities of providing beneficial services to low-wage workers and the poor are limitless for the USPS if it were free of the artificial restraints that have been placed on it by politicians in thrall to the moneyed class.

it takes participation in the sometimes dull routine of the democratic process and some, like the rioters in the U.S. Capitol, want to be gratified instantly, instead of doing the hard work of democracy.